dreamtime also Dreamtime
(drêm´tìm´) nounThe time of the creation of the world
in the mythology of the Australian
aborigines: "Aboriginal myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who wandered
across the country in the Dreamtime . . . singing the world into existence"
(Bruce Chatwin).

"The Aboriginal notion of space
and identity is interwoven in a way utterly strange to the Western mentality,
as is their concept of movement in relation to space and time. The Dreamtime
stories contain, in addition to moral, spiritual, and psychic understanding,
all kinds of practical information.
A story may direct a hunting band to places where the lilies bloom, where turtle
eggs hatch, or where wild yams ripen. The clan follows the stories from
place to place without a calendar. They may visit a site, make camp, perform
rituals, and hunt and gather the yield of a particular region, much as we move
through a yearly calendar of work punctuated by holidays involving ritual celebration
and seasonal foods. The outstanding difference is that the Aborigines
move through space, and we move through time. Aboriginal stories, be they
about life or the Dreamtime, focus
on place descriptions and spatial directions rather than time designations such
as when, before, or after. For example, in the course of a journey of
a few miles along an approximate 180-degree arc the names of 38 separate spatial
directions are marked as sites in a ritual walk at the base of Uluru
(Ayer's Rock) in central Australia. The Aborigine's deep affinity for
the primacy of spatial experience was reiterated thousands of years ago in the
Rig Vedas
of ancient India.

'Space is greater than fire,
for in space are both sun
and moon,
in it are lightning,
stars, and fire. The power of Space; one calls, one hears, one answers;
in Space man rejoices and does not rejoice. Man is born in Space,
man is born for Space. Achieves Space kingdom, worlds rich in light,
unconfined, for striding out bodily and as far as Space reaching, so far
will it be granted to him to walk at will.' "

_Voices Of The First Day_ by Robert
Lawlor

"what we need is a new myth. What
we need is a new true story that tells us where were going in the universe.

And that true story is that the
ego is a product of pathology, and that when psilocybin
is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed. And the suppression
of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product
peddlers."

"the Gaian
mind is what we're calling the psychedelic
experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy
of the planet, and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus
ideologies, but with that experience, the compass of the self can be set. And
that's the idea, that we're figuring out how to reset the compass of the self,
through community, through ecstaticdance,
through psychedelics, intelligence..."

"once you touch the inner
core of your own and someone else's being, you can't be led into thing
fetishism and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture
can be reengineered as a set of emotional values, rather than products.
This is terrifying news. And if we are able to make this point, we can
pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend."

-- Terence McKenna - _Alien
Dreamtime_

7th circuit: Mythical IntelligenceThis is the realm of the shaman,
of spirit animals, Gods and Goddesses. It is the Dreamtime. 3rd circuit draws
models of specifics in the conscious world. 7th circuits draws models of the
patterns of archetype
that make up the unconscious world. It does this by telling stories that
illustrate the patterns that arise from these archetypes. When 7th circuit
awareness is working, one realizes how these patterns are being played out,
and instead of just acting in the world, one is at the same time coming
into direct contact
with the archetypal.

Human creations also first exist
as subjective energetic states of consciousness: dreams, intuitions, and
thoughts that move, like a pendulum, toward objectification in the external
world. Once consciousness has participated in an external creation or
activity, it swings back from an objective reality to a subjective state.
This return, which we call memory,
forms the residual base of all existence.

Both the aboriginal and the Native American perceptions
can guide us towards a way of being in which our inner vision and outer
projection are woven into the natural world in a constant interchange with
the dreams and forms of all earth's creatures.

Space, in our conventional
awareness, is basically felt as distance, the empty interval separating
objects. Our notion of space depends on our notion of time,
which is necessary to measure distance. Hence most of the words we
use to describe space, such as long and short, are also used to describe
time.

Aborigines do not perceive
space as distance. Space for them is consciousness, and, like consciousness,
space is divided into two modes. The perceptible,
tangible entities in space are like the conscious mind, and the invisible
space between things corresponds to the unconsciousness mind. The term
unconscious is misleading: the unconscious mind is always conscious;
it is a continuum of dreaming. In Western culture, the presence and
activity of the unconscious is obvious only during sleep and dreams. For
the aborigines, the unconscious mind is continuous and ever-present, permeating
all levels of existence, just as space invisibly fills everything from
galaxies to the interior of the atom. The conscious mind is like
the things of this world: appearing and disappearing, alternating
between wakefulness and sleep, between life and death.

The visible actuality of a form exists simultaneously
with its invisible potential, just as the conscious perception exists simultaneously
with the flow
of the unconscious. Similarly, the potential of the seed and the actuality
of the plant appear to follow one another in sequence, as day follows night.
From the perspective of the dreaming, though, day and night exist simultaneously
as the opposite sides of a spinning sphere. The aborigines refer to the
inseparable relationship between the actual and the potential, the conscious
and the unconscious, as the light and dark faces of the moon--both
are always present. In a similar manner, the genetic code might appear
to be evolving
in sequence from simple to complex, but the simple, primary cells and patterns
are present on earth at the same time as the complex forms, varieties, and combinations.
The apparent all-pervasiveness of the sequential pattern results from our elevation
of and reliance on the functions of the conscious mind."

"Time and Space in the Dreaming" excerpts from:
_Voices of the First Day_ written by: Robert Lawlor_Magical Blend_ issue #35 April 1992

Dreamtime refers to an experience
and to beliefs that are largely peculiar to the Australian native people. There
are at least four aspects to Dreamtime - The beginning of all things; the life
and influence of the ancestors; the way of life and death; and sources of power
in life.

Dreamtime includes all of
these four facets at the same time, being a condition beyond time and space
as known in everyday life. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time
instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. This is because they experience
Dreamtime as the past present and future coexisting. This condition - :
- altered
states of consciousness - is met when the tribal member lives according
to tribal rules, and then is initiated through rituals and hearing the
myths of the tribe.

Although Dreamtime may sound rather mystical or
mysterious to the Western mind, the experience is based on understandable
and observable facts of social and mental life which are unfortunately
little valued in Western society. For instance the present is observably
the result of past actions or events. Present society is particularly the
result of past great men and women and their - heroic - deeds. For the
Australian native peoples, as with many other ancient races, the heroic
deeds of past ancestors were remembered with great veneration. It was seen
that all present life, and even the personal skills and character of tribal
members, arose out of the life of the ancestors. The ancestors, their deeds,
and what arise from them into the life of the tribe in the present, are
all held in the Dreamtime beyond the shifting events of things happening
one-after-the-other.

The aborigine people believed
that each person had a part of their nature that was eternal. This eternal
being pre-existed the life of the individual, and only became a living
person through being born to a mother. The person then lived a life in
time, and at death melted back into the eternal life.

In writing about the state
of mind - the mental world - of early races, J. B. Priestley - in _Man
And Time_ - says that if we are to properly understand the ancient peoples
we must never project onto them our own state of mind and rational thought.
Studies have shown that ancient people experienced what is called an undifferentiated
state of mind. Their sense of being a separate and independent person was
much less than is commonly experienced in modern life. They did not
separate their religious life, their social life, their economic life,
their artistic life and their sexual life from each other. This is obvious
to even a casual observation of such societies, or even third world cultures,
where religion and eating, and work are all very much connected. To be
banished from the tribe was tantamount to death for primitive individuals,
so deeply were they identified in psychological and practical ways to the
rest of the tribe. But it is not an unusual thing for a modern man or woman
to leave their place of birth, their family or their country, and live
abroad. Such simple facts illustrate the deep divide between the modern
and ancient state of mind.

If we remember our early childhood, with the absence
of an awareness of passing time, the fullness of each day, the eternity
of a week or a month, the enormous and unquestioned - if still untraumatised
- sense of connection with our family, then we will have an idea of the
mental world of the older races. For the aborigine these facts of their
life were tangible realities, known through their inner experience in dreams
and waking visions. Prior to the development of the reasoning and questioning
mind, people did not consider things by thinking about them in neat ideas
and definitions.

So the aborigine would meet
the influence of the ancestors in their life as an actual visionary person,
rather than thoughts about tribal history. With the visionary meeting would
come deep feelings and insights, making it a real educational experience.
This is exactly how dreams express, and in this manner most creative or
problem solving ‘thinking’ was done by ancient peoples. Therefore the entrance
into dreams, or into a condition in which the imagery of dreaming could
function while awake, as in visions or altered states of consciousness,
was important for the aborigine. Common ways of accessing this state of
mind were through ritual or initiation rites. In this way enormous learning
experiences could be met, a sense of complete identification with ancestors
and tribal history achieved, and personal change or growth accomplished.

This condition of mind or
being in which time is ‘all-at-once’ and the past is felt as intensely
close as the present, is a natural and fundamental state. It is what the
baby experiences in the womb prior to the separation at birth and the development
of concepts through the learning of language.
So the rituals which enable the aborigine to return to the womb of all
time and existence enables them to feel connected once more to all nature,
to all their ancestors, and to their own personal meaning and place within
the scheme of things. The Dreamtime is a return to the real
existence for the aborigine. Life in time is simply a passing phase - a
gap in eternity. It has a beginning and it has an end. The life in
Dreamtime has no beginning and no end.

The experience of Dreamtime, whether through ritual
or from dreams, flowed
through into the life in time in practical ways. The individual who enters
the Dreamtime feels no separation between themselves and their ancestors.
The strengths and resources of the timeless enter into what is needed in
the life of the present. The future is less uncertain because the individual
feels their life as a continuum linking past and future in unbroken connection.
Through Dreamtime the limiatations of time and space are overcome. It is
a much observed feature of aboriginal life that knowledge of distant relatives
and their condition is frequently displayed. Therefore if a relative
is ill, a distant family member knows this and hurries to them. Often the
intuitive knowledge of herbal medicine is gained also.

For the aborigine tribes,
there is no ending of life at ‘death’. Dead relatives are very much a part
of continuing life. It is believed that in dreams dead relatives communicate
their presence. At times they may bring healing if the dreamer is
in pain. Death is seen as part of a cycle of life in which one emerges
from Dreamtime through birth, and eventually returns to the timeless, only
to emerge again. It is also a common belief that a person leaves their
body during sleep, and temporarily enters the Dreamtime.

The aboriginal tribes are
connected with their local landscape in a way that perhaps no other race
of recent times is. The landscape is almost an externalisation of the individual’s
inner world. Each tribe had a traditional area of the land which was theirs
alone, and it was believed that in the Dreamtime the ancestors shaped the
flat landscape into its present features. Each feature was in some way
an act of the ancestors, and therefore the tribe. Like many tribal peoples,
the Australian native people were deeply dependent upon their beliefs,
the landscape and their inner life for their identity and strength. This
makes them vulnerable to anything which disrupts their beliefs, although,
apart from such vulnerability, they have a greater psychic sense of wholeness
and identity with their tribe and environment than is common in Western
individuals.